Hacker Cinema
Exit Through the Gift Shop
2010 · Film · documentary · 86 min
Directed by Banksy
Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the incredible true story of how an eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner.
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34 comments on Hacker News
The pillar is fiberglass too, I believe.
There's a (mostly terrible) documentary about a previous bansky "statue" deposited in London that, in one of its better moments, tracks down the people who actually make statues for artists like banksy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Banksy_Job
edit: I feel I should clarify that this is not an official Banksy documentary. He made "Exit Through the Gift Shop" which is an amazing film which I highly recommend to anyone.
The documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (2020) explains the concept and process better than I could hope to do myself, so to do your question justice, I would advise you to seek it out and to watch it. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) is adjacent to the topics raised and is also worth a watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_You_Look:_A_True_Story_About_Fake_Art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop
Freeport facilities are part and parcel to enabling these complex businesses arrangements, and they are mentioned in an aside in the documentary Made You Look; the Geneva Freeport being one of, of not the, world’s oldest and most important such facility is called out specifically if I remember correctly, or maybe one in Antwerp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-trade_zone
If I have a favorite genre of doc, it's the ones about outsider artists. In addition to American Movie I love "Monster Road", "In the Realms of the Unreal", "Exit Through the Gift Shop", and my personal favorite "Crumb".
I remember being introduced to Invader through the Exit Through the Gift Shop film, but I didn't realize that "collecting" space invaders was a thing. Interesting stuff.
Sorry, I think you meant "Exit Through the Gift Shop"
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1587707/
Anything by Adam Curtis. Is he right? Is he wrong? What is going on? He makes some strong arguments at a system-level and of an interdisciplinary nature that really make you think. Despite how people like to write him off, he is likely not too far off the mark most of the time.
Samsara and its kin are engrossing, if not quite stressful. They show you how insane humanity is in rather raw form.
The BBC's Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and Life series are masterclasses in ecological storytelling.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is about as subversively hilarious as you can get.
I'll need to look it up later, but there's a really good documentary about the people who still hand-make Steinway pianos in New York.
I think there's a series called The Planets (?) that covered a lot of the various probes that were sent out.
There's some documentary about the various moon programs, covering Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, etc. It was a series. I can't remember the name or immediately find the one I am thinking of.
There's been a lot of fascinating animal documentaries I have lost track of.
Exit Through the Gift Shop - an amusing documentary about somebody trying to find Banksy (a street artist), and much more, supposingly directed by Banksy himself.
There is some debate if it is documentary or not (the story is almost too good), but it seems the evidence suggests it is real.
EDIT: sorry, I missed the "last 4 years" part in the question. This film is older than that.
Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop reminded me of F for Fake. Ostensibly a documentary but with more complexity.
That's the playbook there, make the documentary about the program. Would be great! I could see an Exit Through the Gift Shop type of vibe. It has all the elements.
Vincent van Gogh. Born 2043, Brabant, Netherlands. Child prodigy in arts, sciences, and engineering. Graduated from Erasmus University, Rotterdam in 2055 with joint masters in particle physics and fine arts. Exhibited at the Louvre at age 14. Discovered a universal nontoxic perpetual energy source at 16 and joined staff of the Huge Monad Collider that same year as doctoral researcher in functional cosmology. There, proved that spacetime is lazily evaluated and that speed of light arises as input latency in underlying algebra. Disappeared November 23rd, 2063, leaving behind notes for a "personal temporal debugger" and a diatribe, hidden in a stencil of rats, railing against the prevailing culture of universal citizen tracing. Last sighted in background of art documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010); current whereabouts within continuum unknown, assumed to be still at large. Eartags never found.
Banksy also showed that the value of art is subjective with his movie "exit through the gift shop".
I can relate. I actually used to work at Artsy (the company who published this article), and before I worked there, I felt much the same way. What I learned after being immersed in the art world is that occasionally, art will "speak" to me immediately. But more often, it grows on me as I understand the context of the art and who made it. This is definitely the case for me with Basquiat, whose work can look like childish scribbles at first glance.
In my farewell email to my Artsy coworkers, I wrote that as I really began to engage with the art world in my time there, I realized I had gained a whole new layer of perception. I was seeing new references and callbacks everywhere in the world around me.
So what I would say is that if you feel like it's going over your head and want to invest the time, it can be extremely rewarding to go down the rabbit hole. You can do this by reading articles, watching documentaries, visiting exhibitions, and finding spaces inhabited by enthusiasts.
Some things to check out:
- The book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark
- The film Exit Through The Gift Shop
This is a criticism of the contemporary art market, but surely art itself is not a scam. As for the market, the film “Exit Through The Gift Shop” is one of the most brilliant skewerings of that system.
I'm a simple man. I see Banksy, I upvote. And I recommend that everyone watches Exit Through the Gift Shop
Exit Through the Gift Shop came out when I was in college and changed my relationship with documentaries and films in general. I won't discuss much of the plot here, but it forces you to really change the way you understand documentaries and to be more critical.
Generation Wealth made me really re-consider the world around me and how culture has shifted in the past 10 years. It was quite eye opening and also forced me to think differently about the people around me.
Good grief.
GoF was wildly successful.
Design Patterns was of a time. We were just learning how to talk about design, the design of design. Now that methodologies, heuristics, frameworks, architecture and so forth have become "democratic", it's hard to appreciate the original efforts out of context.
Concretely:
To Norvig's point, GoF style Design Patterns are just a rung in the programming language maturity ladder. Something like: patterns > idioms > libraries > syntax.
Cynically:
Design pattern implementations just add another layer of indirection. On the notion that you can, may, or should defer an architectural decision. (Opinions differ. I lean towards YAGNI.)
Metaphysically:
Mastery is like becoming a jazz musician. First you have to learn the rules before you know how to break them.
--
I started a design pattern study group in the 90s, still going strong today.
It always kinda goes like this:
First reading, mind blown.
Second reading, aha, now I see how this could be useful.
Third reading, meh, it's obvious, why we still talking about this?
Happily, progress marches forward, and there's always something new (or new again) to argue about. Rinse, lather, repeat.
--
The sole legitimate criticism is the exploitation of the design pattern zeitgeist. Here's a relevant documentary on that phenomenon. "Exit Through the Gift Shop" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587707
Weaponization, misuse, misappropriation of an idea happens every where. I worked for a guy who called everything a Decorator. One of the architects for the Kuali Foundation student project. Took me way too long to figure out he didn't know what a Decorator was. Those conversations were so confusing.
"exit through the gift shop"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587707/
In the art world, Banksy is seen largely as trite and is known to attract new and dumb money. If you've seen his film "Exit Through The Gift Shop", Mr. Brainwash, the aspiring artist he portrays, is quite similar to how anyone who knows or cares a little about art sees Banksy himself.
It isn't just "big money" saying this - ask any cool (poor) artists or curators if they like Banksy and you'll be laughed out of the room. He's the Nickelback of contemporary art. It's not because of his message - lots of other artists make biting, hilarious attacks on global capitalism and consumer culture, if that's what you're into.
Also, as others in this thread have pointed out, practices like this shredding don't actually devalue the piece, and may in fact increase it's value. The shredding is an empty gesture signifying the rejection of a culture that the piece is very much a part of. If a piece is just an investment vehicle, what effect does humiliating the owner of the piece have on the piece's function as an investment vehicle, if it does not lower the value? They (allegedly) own the art only for it's value, so how does this strike back at them?
If you want to look getting money out of art, you might start by looking at the early performance art tradition and what it achieved in terms of decommodification. Pay special attention to the amount of lying and inconsistent storytelling. Ask yourself whether "Exit Through The Gift Shop" (grossed 3MM in USA box office and set Banksy on the track to these $1mm sales) achieves any of the same decommodification.
You know Banksy made a film about exactly what you’re describing called “Exit Through The Gift Shop” right?
No one's mentioned _"Exit Through The Gift Shop"_; the documentary about Banksy??
Plenty of prominent artists have that same studio model, also including Ai Weiwei and, in a sort of satirical way-- Thierry Guetta, as depicted in the film Exit Through the Gift Shop. This "production line" type operation is a bit different thought.
EXAMPLE; BANKSY.
IF THERE IS NO ART IN BANKSY, THEN WHY DO PEOPLE PAY MILLIONS FOR HIS ART? HAHAHAHAHAH..........
metatrolling in this comment by dual useage of the word 'art' fully intended.
but what banksy does seriously is not easy. and if you don't believe me, please watch 'exit through the gift shop', a truly sublime documentary, itself fake , but SO TRUE, totally worth watching twice.
Anyone interested in Banksy but doesn't know much about him? Check out "Exit Through the Gift Shop". About half way through it turns into the most hilarious documentary I have ever seen.
On a similar note, I would also recommend the film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which documents Thierry Guetta's rise in world of street art. While Thierry's artwork is largely considered unoriginal, he's able to make a considerable amount of money after being endorsed by Banksy.
There's a lot speculation saying that Banksy produced/created this film as a hoax to make precisely the same point - art is appreciated more for the person that made it.
This is the entire underlying message of Banksy's film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop
I assert A, B, and C, yes. Banksy managed to simultaneously profit from, and socially comment globally using, a street medium. Paris Hilton was born with the looks and means needed to make connections and she worked from that, gaining notoriety through her lack of inhibition. I can see the comparison in that their trajectories were both unconventional to some degree, but beyond that, not much simularity.
If you haven't, I'd recommend watching the humorous Banksy-related documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop". It's quite interesting and entertaining and not what you'd expect.
If your are all interested in Banksy I'd urge you to watch a film that he accidentally was forced to make about Street Art and himself, well let's say because the original Director...well you will see. It's called Exit Through The Gift Shop, I watched on Netflix.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0b90YppquE
I've always been a fan of Banksy's work. Especially the work he did at the dividing wall on both sides in the West Bank and Israel.
http://www.stencilrevolution.com/banksy-art-prints/flying-balloons-girl/
Man on Wire (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155592/)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587707/)
The King of Kong (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/)
There's a lot of truth in what you said but there is also the other side of that, which is disturbingly real, which is a bunch of yuppies looking at weird shit and playing along with the game because they were told it was classy and artistic. A prime example of this can be seen in the film 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'. It's a documentary about Banksy, the street artist, or at least it started out that way. Basically, this French immigrant to LA, Thierry Guetta was obsessed with street art, banksy, and filming his every waking moment. He went on a journey to find Banksy, did it, and then was kind of mentored by some in the street art scene.
At the end of the film Guetta himself is having this enormous underground art exhibit and famous people like Brad Pitt come! But Guetta is not an artist. It is obvious that he's posing. To say he's emulating his heroes is putting it very nicely. The guy is literally going around an abandoned warehouse throwing strange shit together for the sake of it being strange, calling it art, and then people eat it up going so far as to say he's a genius.
The point is, there was no context. It was strange for strange's sake but it got labelled as art. Everyone is an artist. We all have the ability to be creative and make our own art. That cannot be debated. But what can is how much of it really deserves recognition and what criteria does a work of art have to possess before we can hang it in a gallery and say "that's real art"? For me, real art has a message, it has skill, it is intentional, and the artist puts a genuine piece of themselves into it that you can just really sense. But I digress...
I highly recommend the film, it used to be on Netflix. I think it's a perfect compliment to this article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop
Banksy's film "Exit through the gift shop" explored this argument well I though, indeed took it to the next meta-level and asked "how can you rip-off a modern artist's work?".
http://www.banksyfilm.com/
Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop is a fantastic movie about how art is PRed up to stratospheric prices. I interpreted it as a tongue in cheek satire on himself and other street artists.
Banksy's documentary/mockumentary : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop
For those of you who are curious, the "documentary" Exit Through the Gift Shop is absolutely brilliant and definitely worth watching. I'm not educated enough on the subject to speculate whether or not Guetta is a hoax, but here's another interesting article on the matter:
http://edendale.typepad.com/weblog/2010/12/banksy-yes-banksy-on-thierry-exit-skepticism-documentary-filmmaking-as-punk.html
I thought the this was an awesome opening (couch gag) I am surprised that it made it past Fox though.
I recommend seeing 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' to anyone who is even slightly interested in Banksy, street art, art in general, or documentaries.